Methods
This retrospective study examined the size and proportion of personal payments made by pharmaceutical companies to all authors of CPGs published by the Japanese Society of Neurology between 2016 and 2020. Major pharmaceutical companies affiliated with the Japan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (JPMA), the largest pharmaceutical industry trade organization, were mandated to disclose payments made to physicians for lectures, consultancy services, and manuscript and pamphlet writing, including individual physicians’ names, on their company webpages.19 These payments, disclosed by the companies on their respective webpages, were voluntarily collected by an independent research organization and published in a searchable online database (https://yenfordocs.jp/). The latest version of this database contained payment data from 2016 to 2020. We extracted data on payments for lecturing, consulting, and writing compensations made to the CPG authors from 2016 to 2020. The total amounts of payments and the number of CPG authors receiving payments were calculated. Descriptive analyses, including mean, standard deviation (SD), median, and interquartile range (IQR), were performed on the payment data collected from the companies between 2017 and 2020. As this study was a retrospective analysis of publicly available data and met the criteria for non-human subjects research, institutional board approval was not required.